


Continuum

by catalinacat



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Angst, Art, F/M, Fanart, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pining, Pre-Slash, Unrequited Love, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-23
Updated: 2013-02-23
Packaged: 2017-12-03 07:13:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/695624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catalinacat/pseuds/catalinacat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I measure time by the moments I'm with you"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Continuum

When Arthur met Eames, he was seventeen and wild. Intoxicated by the possibilities of this new field of dream sharing, Arthur had no sense of limitations or control.

Eames was twenty-one and drifting. He spent most his nights wasted and half the day hungover before sleeping until the dark fell again.

Their extractions were unplanned and uncoordinated – always successful, but always bite-your-nails, down-to-the-wire, holy-shit-we-actually-made-it sort of deals.

Arthur relished in the unknown and that split second where things either went your way or you got shot.

Eames would have preferred a trifle more certainty, but he wasn’t one to rock the boat. He preferred danger with Arthur to safety with anyone else – and he had the scars to prove it.

They didn’t have much in common besides a desire to escape into the recesses of dreams.

That, and an overwhelming love that was never realized.

 

+++

 

Eames made his first attempt on Arthur’s eighteenth birthday.

They’d racked up a considerable sum of money together, yet continued to bunk in musty old motels off interstates and back roads in between jobs.

Old habits die hard and all that.

They were lying next to each other on Arthur’s bed – always so close (but never close enough).

Four bottles of beer each were strewn on the floor on either side of them, but Eames was nowhere near drunk enough to excuse his sudden lack of thought in the face of a whole year of restraint.

He turned on his side and brought his face close to Arthur’s.

“What are you doing?” Arthur said.

Eames looked at Arthur’s lips.

“I scarcely know, darling,” he said.

He touched his lips softly to Arthur’s once, twice, a third time.

That’s when Arthur hurled Eames off of him and ran out the door.

Through the grimy window, Eames was able to watch Arthur walk away from him for a whole minute before he was out of sight.

Arthur returned three days later, reeking of sweat, sex, and alcohol.

Eames didn’t say anything because Arthur didn’t say anything.

They left the motel that night, took a new job the next morning, and never spoke of the three days Eames spent drinking his way to oblivion.

 

Arthur was always a bit more serious after that.

It was little things here and there, really – starting research before the day they had decided for the extraction, actually creating the dreamscape with the intention of escaping projections rather than what would be most fun for them, even rejecting a few offers that would have been needlessly dangerous.

It took Eames longer to notice than it should have, given that his job was to watch people.

When he tried to ask Arthur about the change, all he got was a laugh.

Eames did have to admit, as he watched Arthur run from a projection with a smile on his face and shout with the pure thrill of dreaming, that maybe Arthur wasn’t all that changed.

Those little things, though. They were different.

 

+++

 

One year, three continents, and five jobs later, Arthur and Eames are holed up in a bar in Mexico City with what seems like half of their (now ex-) client’s men outside. With guns. Big ones.

Eames resists the _Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid_ cracks that would be easy, but all too close to home at the moment.

Because he just can’t see how they’re going to wriggle their way out of this mess.

The job went bad early – their research failed to show that the mark had received some of that new training that was just starting to pop up. Powerful people who got dream-sharers to teach their minds how to defend against extraction.

Eames didn’t really know the details of it, but he sure as hell knew that it made the mark’s subconscious more violent than anything he had ever seen.

Arthur and Eames had been torn apart by projections within minutes of descending to the dream level.

Their client was less than pleased and sent his minions out with instructions that seemed to center around ‘dead or alive’ without much initiative for that ‘alive’ bit – Eames supposed this is what you get when you decide to accept a notoriously cruel drug cartel boss as a client.

Perhaps they would shy away from those sorts in the future.

In any case, they were now hiding behind the bar, which was rapidly approaching the appearance of swiss cheese with all the bullet holes in it.

“I’m sorry, darling,” Eames says, huddled close to Arthur’s shivering form.

The younger man had already lost a considerable amount of blood from bullets to the leg and the shoulder. It was the kind of blood loss Eames knew meant a hospital _stat_ or it would be too late.

“My fault. Insufficient research. ‘M sorry, Eames.”

His teeth were chattering, for god’s sake.

“Not your fault, love. I missed it, too. Now you just wait, I’m going to get us out of here.”

Arthur nodded, his eyes dropping.

“No, Arthur. You have to stay awake, okay? Don’t fall asleep on me, you hear?” He shook Arthur roughly, ignoring the groan that poured from Arthur’s lips because his eyes, at least, were open again.

Eames crawled over to the phone by the bar and dialed quickly, going through his not-inconsiderable number of Mexico City contacts in his head.

He called someone who called someone else who probably called some other people, all promising to be there within ten minutes. Eames looked at Arthur’s feebly rising chest and told them to make it five.

He’d owe these people for his entire life after asking them to go up against the cartel, but he had to make sure Arthur was safe above all else.

Then Arthur’s eyes closed. His chest stopped rising. Eames screamed.

 

They do survive, the two of them.

Arthur spends two days in the hospital before he finally wakes up to salsa music softly playing from down the hall and his hand enveloped by Eames’ larger ones.

Eames is awake, of course, because he hasn’t slept at all during the time Arthur was out.

The fear was too great that Arthur would pass and Eames wouldn’t be there for him.

Even when the doctors told him that Arthur would be alright, that he was out of danger now, Eames stayed – he stayed and thought of that time they had got rip-roaringly drunk and Arthur confessed that he wasn’t at his mother’s side when she died and that the guilt remained even after several years had passed.

As soon Arthur’s eyes flicker open and he croaks out a painful sounding “Eames?”, Eames breaks down and sobs.

He presses his cheek to Arthur’s cool hand and just cries, letting the pain and the fear of the last two days be expelled from his body.

Then he kisses Arthur’s palm before rising up to kiss his lips, trying to convey with the touch everything he ever felt for Arthur.

Eames feels Arthur’s sharp intake of breath and opens his eyes to see Arthur’s panicked ones.

Then, because Arthur cannot be the one to do it, Eames runs.

 

+++

 

Eames is celebrating his twenty-fifth birthday alone in a bar in Paris when he meets Mallorie.

She is gorgeous, sharp as a rapier, and very much married.

They get to talking – mainly about her eternally late husband and his eternally enduring bachelorhood – and when the topic rolls to occupation she vaguely explains some high-level government job that has something to do with chemistry and mentions the name _Arthur_.

Now, Eames doesn’t know the exact number of people in the world. He just says _a hell of lot_ and goes with that – but he knows that within that _a hell of a lot_ , there are still _a hell of a lot_ of peopled named Arthur. He’s learned to control the flinch that comes with the name.

This Arthur, though, that Mallorie mentions, something flashes in Eames’ head about him.

Rationally speaking, it _shouldn’t_ – Mallorie is laughing about how uptight the kid is, how he’s always prepared, how he researches everything to the ground. This Arthur sounds nothing like Eames’ Arthur.

But then he racks his mind, searches for something that might give him a clue as to what the hell is going on in the situation when he remembers: _Dominic Cobb and Mallorie Cobb, a husband and wife team that are making waves for their developments in dream-sharing. Some real high-level stuff, by the sound of it_.

He can hear Arthur’s voice as clear as a bell, reading from a note a potential client had left them about the job of extracting from the Cobbs’ minds.

Now Eames is glad they refused the job [Arthur said something about the ethics of stealing from what was essentially their own people, which sounded like a crock of shite to Eames] because after meeting Mallorie, he isn’t sure they could have done it.

“PASIV,” Eames says, interrupting Mallorie’s story about Arthur and his suits that manage to stay crinkle-free no matter what happens.

“Pardon?” she asks, her smile dropping at the deadly serious look on Eames’ face.

“PASIV. You know the term, don’t you?”

Mallorie sits back and is silent for a moment.

“Oui, I do. Then the question is how do _you_ know the term?”

“I’m a forger. Or, at least, I was. Haven’t done a lot of it in the past year or so,” Eames attempts a smile that looks mostly like a grimace.

“And how did you know who I was?” she seems slightly more relaxed, but still suspicious.

“You said your name was Mallorie and that your husband was Dominic. You were obviously hesitant to explain much about your work. When you mentioned Arthur, I connected the dots.”

“Arthur? How do know Arthur, then? Are you a friend of his? He doesn’t seem to have very many.”

“Arthur and I, we…” Eames stopped. How impossible it is to explain years of experiences, thoughts, and shadowed feelings into mere words. “We were friends, I suppose. A long time ago.”

“Oh, I see,” Mallorie murmured. “Are you Eames?”

Eames darted his eyes upwards to lock with hers. “Yes, I am. How did you know that? Has he said something about me?”

“No, he hasn’t.”

Eames felt his heart fall.

“But Arthur stayed with us for a while when he first moved to Paris. And in the night, sometimes, he would say the name Eames. Awoke screaming with the name on his lips more than once. I assumed it was a lover passed, but…”

“No,” Eames said thickly. “We were many things, Arthur and I, but lovers was not one of them.”

Mallorie gazed at him steadily.

“I am right in thinking that was not of your choosing, oui?”

Eames felt his heart clench.

“Yes.”

Mallorie and Eames sat at the end of the bar of that little place in Paris for a while longer that night, drinking wine and smoking cigarettes while they talked of nothing at all.

Then Mallorie left and Eames made her agree to not speak of him to Arthur. She promised.

Eames never made it back to the motel that night.

 

+++

 

Shortly after his twenty-fifth birthday, Eames got back into forging.

He had been decent when he left – certainly capable and getting better with every job – but one year out of the world of dream-sharing seemed to be nearly as long as a year within a dream would have been.

Everyone seemed so much smarter and more clever, all the technology more advanced. He found it hard to keep up, so he was forced to accept small-time, shitty paying jobs at first.

He stuck mostly to Africa, the Middle East, sometimes straying into Asia if the situation called for it. He liked the heat and the fact that there was never a chance of running into someone he knew.

Eames was less likely to go into the dream nearly blind, now – he started researching more, spending days studying the mark and whoever it was he was masquerading as.

His skill improved by leaps and bounds to the point where, three years after his re-entry into the world of forging, he could chose his own gigs, pick whatever jobs piqued his interests, and get the position based on his reputation alone.

Eames never accepted a job in Europe or the Americas, knowing how Arthur had always favored the two places above all else.

It was a silly thing, Eames knew. He’d see Arthur sooner or later, given how small the pool of talented dream-sharers was.

But Eames was nothing if not stubborn, and he’d delay the inevitable for as long as he could.

Like he said, the world of dream-sharing was pretty damn small – and all the people in it gossiped like old fish wives, god help them.

It had been four years since he had seen Arthur’s face, yet Eames could talk to any of his underworld contacts or fellow forgers and hear all about Arthur’s latest jobs.

He was working pretty exclusively with the Cobbs, apparently, and they had a reputation for being the very best in corporate espionage money could buy.

Eames thought about the kid who wore whatever he could get out of the dollar-bin at Goodwill and looked at home in the shitty motels they frequented, who would rather set up an extraction in some intricately designed and exotic fabrication than any office building.

Eames wondered where Arthur put that person when he buttoned up a business suit.

 

+++

 

Five years after he last saw Arthur, Eames found himself in Paris, France, watching tourists amble by the small café where he sat.  
  
He went to Europe fairly often these days, despite still operating mostly in more southern locales.  
  
He was indisputably the best forger in the business, for whatever that is really worth.  
  
This meant taking jobs in all the corners of the world, from the tip of South America to that one memorable job on a ship floating in the Baltic sea.  
  
Never did he come across Arthur, however, in all his years and all his schemes.  
  
Eames thought Arthur’s memory should be fading by now, after five years without so much as a glance, but he could still see Arthur’s face as clear as his own in the mirror. The crinkles he’d get near his eyes when he laughed, the soft bristles of shorn hair, the stretched-wide smile he gave so freely.  
  
But that wasn’t the man he watched walk up to him, the man in a sharp grey suit with cold features and harshly slicked back hair.  
  
Eames knew accepting this job was a colossal mistake.  
  
“Arthur,” he said, little more than a croak.  
  
Arthur stopped with at least three feet between them, extending a hand forward as he said, “Eames. It’s been a while.”  
  
Arthur’s hand was cool, his handshake strong and unbearably professional. It was like he was any other colleague.  
  
Eames chuckled wryly. “Five years, three months, and a week. A while, to be sure.”  
  
This caused the solid wall of Arthur’s face to break, revealing a minute flinch and reddening of his cheeks.  
  
“I’m surprised you remember that so clearly.”  
  
Eames looked him dead in the eye and said, “Well, love. I measure time by the moments that I’m with you.”  
  
Arthur cleared his throat and looked away.  
  
Eames decided then that he would stop running. He and Arthur were friends first – family, even – before Eames twisted it all up in his head into something it was not, something it could never be.  
  
He could accept that now. He had to.  
  
  
  
Working with Arthur now was nothing like it used to be.  
  
His reputation for methodical and fastidious research was well deserved, but it was more than that.  
  
It was his shoes that shined so clear you could see your reflection in them, it was the rebuke of any jokes or off-track thought, it was the clear planning of a dream that would be safest and most accessible.  
  
Eames didn’t know this Arthur, but he was trying to.  
  
Working with Cobb and Mal was better than any team he had ever encountered, and Cobb’s architectural prowess combined with Mal’s unparalleled chemistry genius allowed them to be the first to successfully complete a job based on a dream-within-a-dream.  
  
When they went down to the second level, a charming country home conjured by Mal’s mind, Eames looked to Arthur to share the rush of doing something no one else had done.  
  
All he got was the back of Arthur’s head as he walked away to examine the surroundings and find the mark.  
  
Eames was still learning this new Arthur.  
  
  
  
Mal forced them all out for a celebratory drink after the job was completed, saying it wouldn’t be right not to.  
  
She brought them to the bar where she and Eames met, giving him a significant look as they walked in. He ignored it, as he did most things he didn’t want to address. He was good at that.  
  
They sat there for one hour, then two, describing jobs and telling tales, and Eames found himself relaxing in Arthur’s presence for the first time since the godforsaken job had begun.  
  
Mal and Cobb left in the third hour, and Eames was getting up to leave with them when a hand on his arm stopped him.  
  
“Stay,” Arthur said.  
  
So Eames stayed.  
  
They talked for at least another hour, of private successes and failures only the other could appreciate.  
  
It was as intimate as their talks used to be, and Eames found himself swept up in a wave of nostalgia.  
  
He blamed that and the copious amount of alcohol muddling his mind for not walking straight out of the bar when Arthur looked at him and asked, “Can we go back to your place?”  
  
It was a bad idea. Possibly the worst thing he could do.  
  
Eames said yes.  
  
  
  
The trip to Eames’ motel was short, a few hurried blocks at most, but it seemed to stretch longer than any other journey.  
  
It was a pretty shitty motel, far from the respectable, tourist-approved area of the city.  
  
Eames loved it – felt like the good old days to be back there. He wondered what Arthur would think, what he would say.  
  
Arthur didn’t speak when Eames opened the door to a musty room with only a bed, table, and one chair, but Eames saw his hands clench.  
  
Eames understood the strange juxtaposition of the familiar thing of the past and simultaneous unknown quality about it – he saw it every time he looked at Arthur.  
  
Neither said a word when Eames shut the door with a soft click.  
  
The moonlight and streetlight streaming in the window illuminated Arthur’s body as he stripped down, removing each piece of suit as if it were his armor.  
  
With each button that came undone, it was as if a little more of the old Arthur that Eames knew was free again.  
  
Then Arthur brought Eames down onto the bed with a soft kiss, and Eames knew no more.  
  
The bright and unforgiving sunlight stinging Eames’ eyes hurt, but not as badly as the sound that woke him.  
  
Arthur, showered and re-clothed in that suit of armor once again, opening the door to the motel room.  
  
A quick glance to the table confirmed that not even a note had been left.  
  
So Eames closed his eyes quickly and let Arthur leave him.  
  
  
  
Eames always knew Arthur could be heartless.  
  
Even in the before, when Arthur was still young and wild and didn’t let any thing or any rule stop him from the pure thrill of dreaming.  
  
It was what allowed him to thieve without any sense of remorse, to execute a projection that looked as real as any man and not even blink, and now, to leave Eames behind without a second glance.  
  
His Arthur, all grown up.  
  


 

+++

  
  
  
**_Epilogue_ **  
  
Arthur lived a series of routines.  
  
Wake up, turn off the alarm, take a shower, dress for the day, eat breakfast, go to work, eat lunch, work again, eat dinner, work some more, come home, work a while longer, undress, sleep.  
  
Then wake up all over again.  
  
It wasn’t much, but it was something.  
  
Routines allowed him to control the situation, to ensure that he was prepared for what would lay ahead.  
  
There wasn’t much room for imagination in it, but Arthur didn’t mind.  
  
The only irregularity in his routine was the postcards.  
  
They were infrequent and unexpected. One might follow another by only a week or two, or entire months might pass before he saw one.  
  
They were never signed, but they didn’t need to be.  
  
Arthur felt the scrawl of the short messages and knew who was behind it without a doubt.  
  
He wondered, sometimes, if he should write back – but then his hand would rise to feel the ghosting shadow of a soft kiss on his lips, and he stopped himself.  
  
Maybe next time.  
  
  
  
  
  


  
  
  
  


  
  
  
  


 

  
  
  



End file.
